


Counting and breathing

by Trojie



Series: Pity [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Torture, Waterboarding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 23:06:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur gets contracted to extract information from Eames in a non-dreamshare way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting and breathing

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for torture - specifically waterboarding. This was written for my hurt/comfort bingo 2013 prompt 'waterboarding'. Title from 'In the Fade' by Queens of the Stone Age.

_Now_

People say the strangest things about love. 

All's fair in love and war. Love conquers all. Better to have loved and lost. Love is blind. You hurt the ones you love. Love will find a way. Nice and vague and broadly-interpretable, and kind of meaningless, though they do sound nice. Comforting. 

Some people need that, maybe. Comfort. Or love. Eames is unclear which way around it goes, or if they're even two different things, because they might be a cause and effect, and there again, he's unclear which way around it goes. 

What the hell love actually is, now that's something no-one seems to know. It's probably glandular. Chemical - maybe Yusuf could make it in a beaker. Psychological, because chemicals and electrical impulses and the soggy bag of fat in your brain combine to make things happen, as far as Eames can tell, and that's psychology. Or neuroscience. Psychological is where he plays, isn't it? But maybe love's physiological. Eames knows if you provide the right stimulus the brain makes its own chemicals. 

Maybe it doesn't matter. It all loops around, and love, which blindly conquers and finds a way to hurt you, lives in the middle of the cycle, gets you in the cracks somewhere between psychological and physiological and really, ultimately, everything is chemical isn't it? 

Eames is aware that he might be considered chemically-impaired right now, but it's probably the tranquilisers, or the shaking adrenaline in his veins. 

He wriggles his bare toes in the cold water around his chair, checks chamber on his stolen gun, and waits. 

***

_Twelve hours earlier_

Eames wakes up in a cell, which is odd because he went to sleep in a decent enough room above a bar in Rio de Janeiro. It's also worth noting that he didn't go to sleep cable-tied to a dentist's chair in nothing but a pair of underpants which, he notes groggily, shifting in his seat, have that distinctive week-old crispness to them. And he's got a nasty aftertaste in his mouth that suggests his lack of context to these circumstances he finds himself in might be drug-induced.

There is a man in the cell. A guard. Which is odd.

See, the first thing you do, when you imprison someone with a bit of nous, with a bit of talent, with a bit of training, is you take away anything they could turn into a weapon.

And if the people who kidnapped him were good enough to get the drop on him, which they clearly were because here he is, they should know enough to know that leaving someone of Eames's ... talents ... alone with another human being is leaving him armed.

Before he can do anything about it, though, there's a clanking noise outside, and the door swings open. Eames looks up foggily. He could swear he knows the rhythm of those footsteps, banging dully on the iron floor. Where the hell _is_ he, anyway? He can't seem to keep thoughts straight in his head. 

Arthur steps into his line of sight. 'Hello, Eames,' he says. Eames squints at him, tries to file this into place in the mess of his head.

'Arthur,' says Eames. Another man follows Arthur in, and he doesn't look like a guard. He looks like a man who's here because he wants to hear whatever Eames might like to say. He doesn't stay in Eames's sightline - he circles around and stands behind him. 'This is an odd way to conduct a social call,' Eames points out. 

'This is an odd sort of thing to mistake for a social call,' Arthur shoots back. 'I think you need better friends, Mister Eames.'

Eames eyes him. 'You know, I rather think I do,' he says. 

There's a cough from the man standing out of Eames's sight. Arthur looks over Eames's shoulder, and his chin tilts up defiantly just a tiny increment, almost blatant insolence from someone like Arthur, and Eames has this weird spike of hope. 

But before he knows what's happening, Eames's uncomfortable chair is clanking until he's lying back and there's some rank piece of cloth being stretched over his face, and oh, oh fuck, he knows what this is. He fights his restraints and his urge to panic almost equally, and it doesn't work either way. There's something in his blood making him submit, or at least making him not see a way out. 

He was trained for this years ago. Lives ago. The cold, the raw splashing that comes first, startles you with cold drops and the hard feel of water smacking into you, unpredictable, and then the flood. Eames's breath strains against the cloth, he gasps and chokes and his hands and feet clench and release where they're tied. 

They call it waterboarding. Simulated drowning. Eames's eyes sting and his nose is flooded and he can't breathe, he can't, he might as well be full fathom five. Somewhere in his mind is floating the fact that the water is running away, he's not submerged, he's not underwater, but that fact is floating and Eames is sinking, further and further from being able to grab at it. Simulated drowning is still a kind of drowning. 

Waterboarding doesn't sound bad, really. Eames has had needles under his fingernails, he's been whipped on the soles of his feet, he's had quite a lot of interesting experiences in his exciting and varied career and waterboarding sounds like it's the least bad of the lot and yet it's pretty much the worst, as far as Eames's opinion counts. 

He coughs, the water starts to make its way down the back of his throat and he seizes, curls up as hard as he can trying to shake away from the source of his torment. He's drowning. He's fucking drowning. Arthur's drowning him. The water's so cold, he's numb and shivering, the eiderdown-like feeling of whatever the hell drugs they fed him to get him here is being swallowed under the panic and the pain as he fights for air. 

'Why?' Eames chokes when they let him up. The water runs out of his mouth and his nose and he feels like he's dying, which is the point. 'Arthur, please,' he says, water and spit drooling out of him in equal quantities. _'Why?'_

Arthur just looks levelly at him. Clearly, Eames is not supposed to be the one asking the questions here.

'Because you have information people are interested in,' says Arthur coolly. He cocks his eye somewhere over Eames's drooping shoulders, and then looks back at Eames, dripping and shivering and not making the best showing of his life. 'They asked me how well I know you, Eames. And I said, well enough.'

Eames spits noisily onto the floor, tries to get rid of the sensation of drowning, the ringing in his ears. 'For God's sake, Arthur, just ask me the bloody question,' he snarls hoarsely. 'I can't take all this fucking grandstanding.'

His chest heaves again and again, he's retching even though there's nothing to throw up. He'd like to be able to control that. He should have better control over his body, shouldn't he? But he can't seem to get a handle on the thing that makes him jerk and spasm, trying to get rid of the sensation of water that isn't there. Arthur's jaw tightens, his eyelids twitch for a microsecond, like he wants to do something or say something, but then he looks up again, over Eames's shoulder again, and whatever it is he sees takes that fight out of him. 

'The chemists,' says Arthur, changing gear into threat mode, too obviously, so obviously that it's a feint, got to be, and Eames tenses for the blow to come. 'They're cooking something up. Something big. A paradigm shift. And gossip says you might know what it is, so I'm here to ask you questions.' He smiles humourlessly. 'You should be flattered they called me in. Apparently they figured you could hold out on anyone else.'

'I can hold out on you, too,' Eames spits, the action shaking yet more water out of his hair. He shudders at the feel of it dripping. 'Not that I'm going to. I don't know what the fuck the chemists are up to. Why the hell would they tell me anything? Why the hell would they tell _anyone_ anything, until they were sure they could sell it?' 

He braces for the cloth and the water again, knows if Arthur wants to break him then he's broken, or dead, one of the two, because if there's one person in the world Eames has never figured out to get into the head of, it's Arthur. But Arthur just looks up over Eames's shoulder again and says to whoever is standing there in the doorway, 'Let's let him stew.'

'We're on a deadline,' the mysterious lurker says. He doesn't sound best pleased. But Arthur just raises an eyebrow.

'Do you want me to do my job properly?' he asks mildly. 'I mean, because I can fuck this up just as easily as I can get you the answers you want. He's had experience resisting "advanced interrogation techniques",' and Arthur's mouth twists when he uses that phrase, interestingly. 'This is going to take time.' He looks down at Eames. 'And by all means, if you want to have this conversation in front of him, we can continue, although I'd advise against it. You're the boss.'

There's a tight moment, and then there's a sigh from behind Eames. 

'Fine.' The lurker walks away. Arthur stays. He pulls Eames's chair back into a sitting position, creaking and protesting with Eames still tied up in its embrace, and dabs at Eames's face with a pocket handkerchief.

'If I still had a name, rank and number, I'd be reciting them right about now,' Eames says, resisting the urge to knee Arthur in the soft and dangly bits because a) it wouldn't do any good given he's tied up and b) right now getting dry is the thing he wants most in the world. He's going to move to the UAE and never see a body of water ever again. He never even wants to take a shower again, although hopefully that'll fade. 'Your attempts to induce Stockholm Syndrome are doomed to fail.'

Arthur laughs softly, scruffing the damp handkerchief through Eames's hair like a towel. 'Typical. Even a fucking waterboarding won't make you be serious.'

'I'm deadly serious, darling.'

'So am I, Eames. I always am.' Arthur pushes back up to his feet and moves towards the door. Eames twists to watch him. 

'I hope they're paying you commensurate with the difficulty of this job they've given you,' he says. Despite himself, he'd hate to think Arthur'd take a job like this cheap. He hopes it would take a shitload of money to make Arthur turn on him. 'I hope I'm worth it.'

'You always are,' Arthur says quietly, and leaves.

Silence descends into this metal room with the wet, sloppy floor, and Eames untwists himself and tries to get some kind of comfortable on the soaked-through chair. It's not like he's got a choice about being here, he might as well make it as easy on himself as possible. Every dripping noise makes him twitch. He tries to stop listening, but he can't. Time's still shaky on him, thoughts are still slippery. 

And then there's a shuffling noise and Eames realises he's not alone any more. Arthur sent the guard back in with him. 

There's a clang as the guard closes the door. 

And that gets Eames's mind working, cuts through wounded pride and leftover drugs and the lingering terror of gasping. Arthur sent the guard back in here. 

See, if Eames were incarcerating Arthur, he'd shave his head and leave him stripped naked and unbound in a bare, windowless room with an armed guard outside, who didn't have a key. It's a bit extreme, sure, but a fundamental point of imprisonment is to leave no tools for your prisoner to use to escape - and this is Arthur. Even with all those hypothetical precautions, the only really safe way to keep him somewhere he didn't want to be would probably be to break all of his limbs as well, and dose him up to his eyeballs on Valium before leaving him alone.

Arthur knows Eames knows this. Arthur knows Eames analyses people. Arthur and Eames, they're both deadly serious even when they're joking or jaded or jittery. Eames understands that he's no Arthur, and Arthur knows it - that he gets to keep his hair and his undergarments and his limbs, because he's good but he's not that sort of good. 

But there's still a guard in the room. Actually in the room with him. And he's armed. Eames can see the print of the gun holstered under his shirt. 

And Eames might be tied up, might still be groggy on the last knockings of a head full of tranquilisers, might still be coughing, chest hitching from the phantom feeling of drowning on dry land, but he hasn't been gagged. 

Maybe Arthur _does_ love him after all.

***

_Now_

Having your wrist tied down doesn't rob you of the movement in your fingers. Eames's hands are at pocket level. The guard was carrying a knife as well as a gun. The rest of it was a matter of misdirection, dexterity, and a certain amount of anatomy. 

The puddle on the floor isn't strictly-speaking clear any more. 

Eames has made sure that the body of the guard can't be seen from the door, but there's nowhere to actually hide it, so he's going to have to be quick. His wrists are raw from the bindings, but he's free. The guard's gun has a full mag. Eames stays sitting in the chair and waits. 

He's going to have to be quick.

Arthur comes back through the door alone this time. There's a dull sloshing noise that suggests he's back for business. He pauses. Eames is still looking away. Arthur must have either seen that Eames is untied, or seen the body. It doesn't matter. Eames pushes out of the chair before he can do anything about it.

The bucket hits the ground and Arthur's hands grab the sky, but he stares evenly and calmly at Eames and says, 'Go on,' when Eames levels the barrel of the gun at his head. 'I've got it coming, I suppose.'

Eames's instincts are yelling at him to pull the trigger. They're instincts that have kept him alive so far, so they're worth listening to, but he doesn't just yet. He still doesn't know _why_. 

'You knew I could get that poor sod's gun,' Eames says. 

Arthur shrugs.

'You fucking tortured me and then left me alone in a room with a weapon. A room you willingly walked back into.' The _why?_ has to come out in Eames's voice, which is low and sore and raw from the water. It hurts when he swallows. It hurts to talk. But he has to know.

'I told you, they asked me how well I knew you,' Arthur says quietly, like this is the explanation. He keeps his hands up.

'You did,' Eames growls. 'So?'

'So, they already knew,' Arthur says. 'They knew we've worked together, they knew we've fucked around. Eames, they thought I wouldn't take the contract because of it.' He shrugs. 'It was a test. A trap. So I _had_ to take the contract.'

'Still doesn't explain why you left me a weapon,' Eames says. His finger is still on the trigger. He doesn't want to pull it. What was he saying earlier about Stockholm Syndrome? 'You didn't have to. I get that you had to take the job, but you're not this fucking stupid, Arthur, come on.'

Arthur's expressions still make no sense in context to Eames sometimes. This one is the kind of face a man pulls when he's pleading. He sighs. 'They would have put someone else on you instead,' he says. 'If I hadn't taken this job. And then sometime down the road they would have used this … they would have used the fact that I am this fucking stupid against me.'

'Yeah, well, now you've let me escape,' Eames points out. 'So how does this help you not look stupid, Arthur? How does this get you out of the line of fire?' He's still got the gun levelled straight at the space between Arthur's eyes. 

Arthur smiles. 'Depends where you shoot me, I guess.'

He drops his arms and stands there and _fuck_ , Eames sees the shape of it now, sees how it snaps into place and it leaves him breathless. Bloody Arthur and his bloody psychotic point-man deep-cover balls-to-the-wall plans. He's fucking _brilliant._

There's a commotion down the corridor. Sounds like someone's realised there's a jail-break afoot. 

'Arthur,' says Eames, dropping his aim to the centre of Arthur's mass and then deliberately twitching the barrel of the stolen gun just a little to the right. 'I think I fucking love you.'

He pulls the trigger.

***

_Twelve months later_

Eames is in Hawaii, trying to keep his heartrate at resting rate while sitting next to a swimming pool, when he sees Arthur's arse sauntering through his line of sight.

Ten minutes later, it does it again, but closer. 'This is the last place I expected to see you,' Arthur murmurs as he passes Eames on his way around the resort pool. He keeps moving before Eames can answer him.

'I can't even take a bloody bath any more, thanks to you,' Eames growls half an hour later as he queues behind Arthur for a cocktail at the kitschy little bar. 'Phobias are _liabilities_ in my line of work, you arsehole.'

'Most lines of work, I'd think. Anyway, what are you doing here?' Arthur asks, handing his credit card across the bar. He's in a fetching little pair of swimming trunks, and there's a pink, well-healed dimple of scar tissue across his right pectoral muscle. 'Given the phobia.'

'They call it 'graded desensitisation',' Eames says. 'The alternative method was the unfortunately named 'flooding'.'

'I can see why you didn't go for it.' Arthur looks away for a moment and then meets Eames's eyes properly for the first time. 'I am sorry,' he says. 'About the … you know. If you want me to leave -'

'I don't,' says Eames. 'If I wanted you to leave, I'd have gone for the headshot,' he adds bluntly, and Arthur smiles. 'Don't go. I'm told I need to work on my trust issues as well as the phobia,' Eames adds. He shrugs. It's … broadly speaking the truth. He didn't so much see a psychiatrist as self-diagnose, but at the very least, he needs to be able to fake trust just to do his job, right? If he can be around Arthur and water without issue, that's cured enough for him.

'Point,' Arthur says, and turns back to the bartender who's trying to get his attention for a signature. Then, drink in hand, Arthur slides off back to his vantage point on the billionaire pharmaceuticals CEO Eames suspects he's stalking. Eames waits in line, but when he opens his mouth to order, the bartender slides a drink in front of him. 'For you, from the gentleman who just left,' she says, smiling. 

'If this is a Sex on the Beach, I'll shoot him again,' Eames mutters, sipping it. 'Properly this bloody time.'

They have discreet bartenders here - this one doesn't even twitch an eyebrow at Eames's threat. 'Actually, sir, it's a Long Slow Comfortable Screw Up Against A Wall,' she says evenly. She passes Eames a napkin. 'The gentleman who ordered it for you asked me to give you this, too.'

There's a number on the napkin she passes across. Eames is utterly unsurprised. There's also a scribbled note. 

_Let me know if I can help you with that bath issue. Trust optional._


End file.
